The if800 - Colour in your computing

The awkwardly-named if800 from OKI - first launched in 1980 - was on the face of it yet another conventional Z80A-based micro, however it differed from many by coming with an integrated printer - thanks to OKI's background as a printer manufacturer.

OKI dates back to 1881 when it was founded as Meikosha Ltd in Tokyo, with its name being changed to Oki Electric Works in 1889.  It was originally a telephony company, producing handsets and exchange equipment before beginning research into electronic computers in 1957.

The company launched several computers during the 1960s and 70s, before its first thermal printer appeared in 1972, followed by its first dot-matrix printer - the DP100 - in 1975.

It launched its famous Microline range of printers at the very end of 1978. These were produced in response to a deal signed with [@Tandy] in September 1978 to produce low-cost printers. The first of these - the ML80 - went on sale in 1979, with its "engine" appearing in the if800 Model 120.

The printer business had become big enough to be spun out in 1994 as Oki Data Corporation[source: https://www.oki.com/global/profile/history/his_7.html]. In its heyday of the mid 1990s, the company's factories were producing up to 1.4 million 9-pin printer heads per year[source: "OKI Technical Review", April 2002, Issue 190 Vol. 69, No. 2, p. 100].

And whilst printers for home and business use have migrated towards inkjet and laser, Microline printers are still available (as of 2025) for specialist roles, like printing multi-part stationery.

[picture: OKI_if800_prac_dec81.webp|Another advert for the if800, from December 1981's PRAC, showing the if800 from LSI's OEM Systems division. Curiously, the monitor and print-out are showing the logo of BMC, the company which officially marketed the if800 outside of Japan]

Meanwhile, the if800 also came with up to 256K RAM on the Model 30 variant, which was bank-switched into 64K chunks as that was all a Z80 could address at once, and could support Kanji Chinese/Japanese characters with its high-resolution graphics.

Apparently considered as the machine which pioneered the business personal computer market in Japan[source: https://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/personal/0005.html], the part-printer part-micro was sold in the UK by [@LSI], which produced its own range of micros built by its manufacturing division CPU Computers[source: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/information-wanted-lsi-computers-m-four.1239479/].

OKI released further models in the if800 range culminating with the Model 60, launched in 1985. This model dispensed with the built-in printer to become what was effectively a regular IBM clone, using an Intel 8086-2 CPU.